The surprise you don’t expect: in Zandvoort there is already the Sunday crowd all for Max Verstappen. The house idol did only seven laps on hard tires and then stopped on the track due to the failure of the gearbox at the elevated corner 3, after being the fastest up to that moment. The Dutchman returned to the pits without taking off his helmet, annoyed by the stop of the transmission: Red Bull had asked the FIA to be able to open the seals for the replacement of a shaft that had been authorized yesterday, but evidently the problem was elsewhere. Session over for the world champion.
And then the door opened to a moment of glory for the Mercedes that closed the first free practice session of the Dutch GP in the first two places with George Russell capable of 1’12 “455 with the soft, ahead of 240 thousandths Lewis Hamilton The silver arrows pull out their claws in the flying lap after the disappointments of Spa, but Zandvoort is closer to Hungary where Russell had scored his first pole in F1.
After a long fine-tuning work, working on the heights, the W13s also showed a good pace. Behind the Mercedes is Carlos Sainz who got his time of 1’12 “845 (+390 thousandths) earlier, when the track was still green. While Charles Leclerc delayed more in understanding the hard and switched to the soft he did not go beyond sixth place, paying three tenths to his teammate and six to the Stella.
In front of the Monegasque there are the two McLarens of Lando Norris and Daniel Ricciardo who are still traveling, even if the Englishman takes off the aussie by two tenths. Bad Sergio Perez: with the second RB18 the Mexican made some mistakes due to an evident understeer. The gap is heavy, almost a second. And without Verstappen’s reference the world champion team seems to have gone into the ball …
The two Alpines follow with Fernando Alonso and Esteban Ocon eighth and ninth, ahead of Alexander Albon’s Williams again in good evidence: if the Anglo-Thai is in the top 10, Nicholas Latifi closes the last list of the last!
During this session we saw the drivers trying the bigger mirrors ahead of next year and the FIA authorized to open the DRS early in banking.
Mick Schumacher is 11th with Haas with Kevin Magnussen 13th. The German is under investigation for trying to get back on track while the red flag was displayed for Verstappen. Between the two Haas is Lance Stroll with the best Aston Martin, while Sebastian Vettel is 15th.
Pierre Gasly with the AlphaTauri preceded the four-time world champion. He disappoints Alfa Romeo 16th with Guanyu Zhou and 18th with Valtteri Bottas.
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